For a while now, I’ve been fascinated by the potential of gamification in Oil & Gas and Energy.

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It’s an vast space with endless possibilities—from simple knowledge-testing games to complex decision-making challenges involving negotiation, resource management, and strategy.

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The creative opportunities are endless, but to make it work, we need to start simple.

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I'm not thinking of a console-based, complex, graphics-intensive game like those for PlayStation at this stage—rather, something simpler, like a plain-screen, Q&A-style game.

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Twine: A Tool for Interactive Narratives

Let me introduce Twine (twinery.org), an open-source platform for creating interactive, nonlinear stories and games.

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With Twine, you can craft branching narratives without any coding knowledge—a perfect tool for developing educational, text-based adventures.

• Users make choices that shape the story’s outcome.
• The experience becomes dynamic, engaging, and tailored to their decisions.

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Twine is incredibly user-friendly:

• Stories are made of passages linked together like a flowchart.
• Click, write, and connect—it’s intuitive and takes minutes to learn.
• Games can be exported as HTML files and shared to run on any browser.

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A Quick Demo

To give you a flavor, I built a simple 5-level Twine game: Your First Job at GeoDrill Inc.

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You’ll face ethical dilemmas, technological innovations, environmental concerns, and stakeholder challenges. Every decision shapes your journey, highlighting the delicate balance between profitability and responsibility, innovation and practicality, and leadership and collaboration.

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After designing the levels, challenges, and the interactions between the branches, this is what the Twine map looks like:

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This translates to a screen like this on the front end:

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You can try the demo and have a quick click-away game on my CrowdField website here:

https://www.crowdfield.net/narrative-game

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Where Can We Take This?

The potential applications for gamified learning tools are enormous, from training programs to leadership development. Here are a few examples to inspire you:

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1. Educational Training Programs

• Reservoir Simulation Pathway: Navigate choices around porosity, permeability, and modeling to see how decisions impact production forecasts.
• Drilling Troubleshooting Adventure: Respond to real-time challenges like stuck pipe or lost circulation to practice decision-making under pressure.
• Petrophysics Challenge: Interpret well logs to identify hydrocarbon zones, sharpening evaluation skills.

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2. Leadership Workshops

• Field Development Strategy Game: Plan wells, allocate budgets, and see how your decisions influence success.
• Crisis Management Simulation: Handle a blowout or environmental incident while managing teams and communication.
• Stakeholder Negotiation Role-play: Balance competing interests with regulators, partners, and local communities.

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3. Decision-Making Games

• Exploration Investment Dilemma: Allocate budgets across prospects with varying risks and rewards.
• EOR Pathway: Choose techniques like waterflooding or gas injection based on reservoir economics.
• Reserves Compliance Challenge: Book reserves while adhering to ethical and regulatory standards.

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4. Soft Skills Development

• Ethical Dilemmas: Face decisions on data integrity and stakeholder transparency.
• Mentorship Pathways: Simulate mentor-mentee interactions and their outcomes.

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5. Onboarding Programs

• First Day on the Field: Explore workflows from seismic data acquisition to production monitoring.
• Safety and Policy Orientation: Navigate company protocols to avoid simulated accidents.

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6. Collaboration and Communication

• Cross-Disciplinary Project Workflow: Manage communication between geologists, reservoir engineers, and drilling teams.
• Data Integration Journey: Integrate seismic, log, and production data to build coherent reservoir models.

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Imagine turning your work into stories that grab attention and stick. Instead of sharing dry facts, what if you showed the journey—challenges faced, insights gained, and the impact made?

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A good story draws people in, makes your message clear, and keeps them interested. How could you turn your work into a story worth hearing?

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Keen to Collaborate?

I’m looking to explore this space with anyone excited about narrative game design and its applications in Oil & Gas.

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It might lead nowhere, but it could also lead somewhere exciting.

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If you’re interested, let’s connect and start building!

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